oldfarthenry:Endive Wombat: I can tell you that part of my frustration with my wife's yammering is my job. I talk all day long, I am in meetings every day, I am on the phone all day. Sometimes, I want to watch stupid, mindless TV or listen to show tunes and cook without any conversation, even if it is just for an hour.

Sometimes I just want to sit in a chair and stare into space. Mrs. Henry always assumes I'm having a stroke and calls the damn ambulance for me.

oldfarthenryIn the early years of our marriage I used to be able to stop Mrs, Henry's babble-yakking with a loud burst of flatulence.Now all it does is switch the subject noise to "poor air quality", "stubborn laundry stains" and "demands to see a doctor".

Dow Jones and the Temple of Doom:Gf: Where's the Klondike bars?Me: I don't knowGf: Did you eat them all?Me: I ate some, I'm not sure how manyGf: Well they're all gone so you must have eaten all of them!Me: OkGf: I only had one!Me: I'll stop by the store and get some more if you wantGf: So now we have to make a special trip just for Klondike bars?? You'll just eat those tooMe: Isn't that what they're for?Gf: They're for both of us!Me: So eat them! It's not my fault you only ate one.Gf: You know I'm dieting right now!Me: ???

Ouch. I seriously think I'd rather be kicked in the balls then have a conversation like this.

Endive Wombat: I can tell you that part of my frustration with my wife's yammering is my job. I talk all day long, I am in meetings every day, I am on the phone all day. Sometimes, I want to watch stupid, mindless TV or listen to show tunes and cook without any conversation, even if it is just for an hour.

I'm wondering that too. And why do you stay with them if they annoy you so?

Speaking for myself, for a long time my wife was annoying as hell to talk to. But eventually I came to realize that she and I just communicate differently (and we're pretty average, from what I can tell). If you want to be happy, you have to accept that she communicates like that. Also very important: deep down, she wants and literally *needs* to vent stuff to you. Let her vent, be supportive, and don't take the venting as some kind of personal attack (because it's not). It's all cool.

If you claim to be with a woman who doesn't vent and communicates like a man, odds are they are transsexual. NTTAWWT.

Dirtybird971:hitlersbrain: If you are a man, imagine all the time, thought and energy you put into dreaming about sex and scheming to get sex. Assume women have about the same energy levels and that they have practically no sex drive. All that energy has to go somewhere right?

you are doing it wrong. Unless, you are dating women out of menopause.

If only. My favorite fantasy is a world full of women with sex drives comparable to mens'. More likely is a world where men have the barely perceptible sex drive of women. The inane chatter will be deafening.

I'm wondering that too. And why do you stay with them if they annoy you so?

Speaking for myself, for a long time my wife was annoying as hell to talk to. But eventually I came to realize that she and I just communicate differently (and we're pretty average, from what I can tell). If you want to be happy, you have to accept that she communicates like that. Also very important: deep down, she wants and literally *needs* to vent stuff to you. Let her vent, be supportive, and don't take the venting as some kind of personal attack (because it's not). It's all cool.

If you claim to be with a woman who doesn't vent and communicates like a man, odds are they are transsexual. NTTAWWT.

Exactly. Once you grow up and realize that good relationships actually take work and sacrifice, things aren't so bad.

Doesn't mean it isn't fun to talk about your partner's foibles with other like-minded individuals, though.

Endive Wombat:oldfarthenry: Endive Wombat: I can tell you that part of my frustration with my wife's yammering is my job. I talk all day long, I am in meetings every day, I am on the phone all day. Sometimes, I want to watch stupid, mindless TV or listen to show tunes and cook without any conversation, even if it is just for an hour.

Sometimes I just want to sit in a chair and stare into space. Mrs. Henry always assumes I'm having a stroke and calls the damn ambulance for me.

Aren't you a TFer?

I've been sponsored a few times - but I ain't paying $5 a month for that.

Klippoklondike:Article says women are better at small talk? If the point at small talk is to say 20 gazillion words with no clear point and no single topic or direction then yes, women are great at small talk. If the point is to kill time and actually learn something, men are better at small talk.

Yeah, it would help if you knew what small talk was.

Unless, of course, your real point was to demonstrate that women are better than men at small talk, in which case, bravo.

Have you ever tried to say "I'm gonna be home soon, and we can talk about this then" I have, because I know that in 20 minutes, I will run out of "news" to both tell and hear. Then when I'm home, and feel caught up on the situations, I have nothing to say. And that's fine with me, cuz I'll just wander off and do whatever while the lady pokes on her cellphone or tablet.

EightyEight:you are not alone. I now only accept emails or texts from my ex, 2 summers ago I told her exactly which two weeks I was taking our boys, she 'got confused' and planned her vacation over those 2 weeks, that was the end of oral communication with her.

Anybody else think Pesci in Casino? Maybe I put your head through that window, you get unconfused.

reveal101:PanicAttack: my alt's alt's alt: I think it has more to do with personality type. In the eyes of Myers-Briggs, the typical "most womanly" personality type of ESFP is overtly talkative and superfluous in their speech patterns. Whereas myself, the INTJ woman, considers small talk stupid and pointless.

/other women don't "get" me, especially when my eyes glaze over while they ramble about talk shows and shoes//men think I'm "cold"///fark the lot of them

As an ISTJ, I completely agree.

Another INTJ (male) here. I'm pretty sure that fark is filled with people with similar personality types, this opinion being based on over 10 years of lurking the threads. Introverted and extremely intelligent people tend to flock to this site.

bunner:"I mean, cause and effect. Have you tried NOT nagging me and seeing what happens?"

See, I've tried to explain that. I've even had this conversation:

Her: When are you going to do X?Me: I already did.Her: When?Me: This morning.Her: It's about time.Me: You first asked me to do it this morning.Her: I shouldn't have had to remind you.Me: You didn't. I did it this morning.

And I have the hardest time getting across the fact that her apparent need to remind me of something is not the same as me needing to be reminded. If anything, if she really thinks I'm that much of a farking idiot, it just deprives her of the opportunity to be surprised when I do it without being reminded... like I absolutely always do.

SmackLT:Endive Wombat: Yeah, she's letting Martin put it in her pooper, and she's enjoying it too!

Me: Hey honey, are you doing Martin?Her: What do you mean?Me: Are you having sex with him?Her: What do you mean?Me: One of the various forms of sexual copulation, including but not limited to penile vaginal penetration, oral genital copulation, penile anal penetration, digital vaginal penetration, a Dutch blindfold, a two-finger Susie, a reverse Andre the Giant, an angry aardvark, or a wet Albert?Her: ...Her: ...Her: No?

Smelly Pirate Hooker:It's amusing that so many of you are married to dipshiats who won't shut up. I'd be sympathetic, but so many of you are also assholes, so I figure you deserve it.

I wont speak for all the assholes (just me), but this is just venting/commiseration. My current gf does yammer occasionally, but I find it amusing, especially since she doesn't do all of the passive/aggressive, underhanded vindictive garbage my X did wife did.

Raise your hand if you are a guy and you have had a conversation with one of your buddies that was entierly made up of single word responses.

(raises hand)

A girl friend of mine, who can be very pedantic when it comes to English, overheard me talking on the phone with one of my buddies. The whole conversation took maybe... 20 seconds?

Her: "What was that?"Me: "I was talking to Bob."Her: "No you weren't! You said six, maybe seven single words. They weren't even sentences!"Me: "Yes I was. We're going out for pizza at 6. Want to come with us?"Her: (annoyed)

PsiChick:More like: "We have never once even heard of linguistic anthropology, because social sciences are for LOOZERS!". Seriously, hard sciences have got to STFU about soft sciences, because social sciences occasionally find out shiat that makes you look like a retard, such as the current theory that's so secure it's taught to 101 students: Women and men have differing speech patterns because of cultural hardwiring. Unless you find a pattern that occurs in multiple different cultures before globalization, you are not looking at biology, you're looking at culture.

I love hard sciences, but occasionally I wonder if they're trying to parody themselves. Just because you can't measure social influence with decimal points doesn't mean social influence doesn't exist. It just means you need to figure out a different measurement.

Actually, I find that both the natural sciences and the social sciences share a common bias: They assume any foible of human behaviour must be due to the consequences of that which they study. Having studied both at one time or the other, I find this exasperating. We're biological entities with hardwired cognitive behaviours built into a variable and plastic organic substrate. We have instincts and biases that we all share, but which are subject to modification by the environment, especially sociocultural values.

For example, there's the point that most men in most cultures find a waist to hip ration of 0.7 to be the most attractive. Yet there are social scientists who dispute this by pointing out that there are cultures that identify obese women or very thin women as most attractive. I see these sorts of arguments and want to /facepalm so hard , because the argument misses the obvious conclusion. The biological baseline preference exists but is subject to extensive modification by cultural values. Nature AND nurture.

I think something like this study is another potential example of this exasperating tendency. A biological difference has been found that apparently would support a common behavioural tendency. That in no way means that tendency cannot be modified by cultural influences, but those cultural modifications do not give the social scientists grounds to dismiss it out of hand either.

Complexity is the norm for explaining behaviour in social animals. There are no unique causes. I am of the considered opinion that the social scientists and the natural scientists need to stop arguing and wrangling over who is right or wrong and start comparing notes on stuff like this in order to try and figure out what the relationship is between the underlying biological tendencies we all share as humans and the pronounced cultural influences that modify how those tendencies get expressed.

Primitive men used to leave the family and their settlements to go on hunts. Sometimes they'd be long, and they had to develop the ability to orient themselves and identify signs and landmarks to find their way around and get back home. Not much verbalization required, but men developed better spatial skills and sense of direction.

Primitive women bore and raised children. They developer keener interpersonal intuition. They had to understand the non verbal clues coming from infants. They also spent more time in the settlements dealing with others, sometimes having to communicate in pre-lingual ways. They developed more complex language skills.

That's a great Just-So story, but there isn't really a lot of evidence that the sexual division of labor like you describe actually happened that long ago. It was more likely a pretty recent invention.

Worst-er is the "midnight download." I can't keep my eyes open, need to be up in 6 hours or less, and now is the time she wants to offload every bit of data. I try, I really DO try, to keep my eyes open. Problem is, I'm concentrating so hard on staying awake that I can't focus on what she's saying, much less process that information or contribute to the "conversation". At some point, my eyes just close and I'm unaware of that fact, but can still hear talking without understanding a word.

"Kids have a swim practice tomorrow and then there's Y's birthday party Saturday but we were going to eat with neighbors so we'll get Grandma to take Kid3 to that, so Kid1 and Kid2 can stay home. Should we get them pizza? I have to work Sunday from home for a project, so you'll have to take care of the laundry and shopping, when you're making the list don't forget q-tips and conditioner. I don't care what kind, just not mango. Speaking of which, should we pick up an appetizer for Saturday? When we go on vacation next summer we should bring video X which will be fun for the family. Kid 2 has a loose tooth, so make sure you get some dollar coins at the bank. Oh, the shopping list we need some AA batteries and some tea. We need to get Kid1 and Kid2 to the swimming store to try on team suits. 2 weeks from Friday is Market Day - did you order anything yet? I liked the eggplant last time, so get that, unless you want something else. Were you going to help your dad on Sunday too? Your mom called and they'd like your help with {chore}..."

socquitor:Worst-er is the "midnight download." I can't keep my eyes open, need to be up in 6 hours or less, and now is the time she wants to offload every bit of data. I try, I really DO try, to keep my eyes open. Problem is, I'm concentrating so hard on staying awake that I can't focus on what she's saying, much less process that information or contribute to the "conversation". At some point, my eyes just close and I'm unaware of that fact, but can still hear talking without understanding a word.

"Kids have a swim practice tomorrow and then there's Y's birthday party Saturday but we were going to eat with neighbors so we'll get Grandma to take Kid3 to that, so Kid1 and Kid2 can stay home. Should we get them pizza? I have to work Sunday from home for a project, so you'll have to take care of the laundry and shopping, when you're making the list don't forget q-tips and conditioner. I don't care what kind, just not mango. Speaking of which, should we pick up an appetizer for Saturday? When we go on vacation next summer we should bring video X which will be fun for the family. Kid 2 has a loose tooth, so make sure you get some dollar coins at the bank. Oh, the shopping list we need some AA batteries and some tea. We need to get Kid1 and Kid2 to the swimming store to try on team suits. 2 weeks from Friday is Market Day - did you order anything yet? I liked the eggplant last time, so get that, unless you want something else. Were you going to help your dad on Sunday too? Your mom called and they'd like your help with {chore}..."

My Yali or Yours:Women don't want you to douse the flames by helping solve their problems, they want you to further stoke their "why me" fires by basically crying and boo-hooing along with them.

I find that a semi-dismissive "sorry, sweetie ... bummer" helps. Of course then the wheels start going in my head about how to actually SOLVE the issue, but that's cured by pouring brown liquors on frozen water.

oldfarthenry:In the early years of our marriage I used to be able to stop Mrs, Henry's babble-yakking with a loud burst of flatulence.Now all it does is switch the subject noise to "poor air quality", "stubborn laundry stains" and "demands to see a doctor".

All that happens in my house when I try that is we get into a farting contest.

I'll come home from work and he'll ask, "How was your day?" and I can turn that one question into a 20-minute monologue with quotes, voice-overs and props. By the time I'm done he knows the name and physical make-up of everyone I encountered between 8am and 5pm, whether or not I like them, and how I think they impacted the emotional success of my day.

My husband is a firefighter.

He'll come home from work and I'll ask, "How was your day?" He'll answer: "House caught on fire. Guy died."

That there is full of so much win!

Can someone *please* post the image of 'Her Diary / His Diary'? (can't from work)

The gist is a woman's diary entry for one day (a paragraph that goes into ever escalating drama and interpretation with no evidence) and her man's entry for the same day (about a sentence...which actually answers all of the drama of the women's succintly). Funny and enlightening, in one!

Ugh, I hear ya buddy. Mine used to do this immediately when I walked in the door from work. Just venting at me after a long day at the office. Tried to put a rule in for 30 minutes of quiet time after work but didn't last.I found that the best thing to endure her ongoing biatching about everything was scotch.

KiltedBastich:PsiChick: More like: "We have never once even heard of linguistic anthropology, because social sciences are for LOOZERS!". Seriously, hard sciences have got to STFU about soft sciences, because social sciences occasionally find out shiat that makes you look like a retard, such as the current theory that's so secure it's taught to 101 students: Women and men have differing speech patterns because of cultural hardwiring. Unless you find a pattern that occurs in multiple different cultures before globalization, you are not looking at biology, you're looking at culture.

I love hard sciences, but occasionally I wonder if they're trying to parody themselves. Just because you can't measure social influence with decimal points doesn't mean social influence doesn't exist. It just means you need to figure out a different measurement.

Actually, I find that both the natural sciences and the social sciences share a common bias: They assume any foible of human behaviour must be due to the consequences of that which they study. Having studied both at one time or the other, I find this exasperating. We're biological entities with hardwired cognitive behaviours built into a variable and plastic organic substrate. We have instincts and biases that we all share, but which are subject to modification by the environment, especially sociocultural values.

For example, there's the point that most men in most cultures find a waist to hip ration of 0.7 to be the most attractive. Yet there are social scientists who dispute this by pointing out that there are cultures that identify obese women or very thin women as most attractive. I see these sorts of arguments and want to /facepalm so hard , because the argument misses the obvious conclusion. The biological baseline preference exists but is subject to extensive modification by cultural values. Nature AND nurture.

I think something like this study is another potential example of this exasperating tendency. A biological difference has been ...

...Anthropology actually discusses the difference between a social trait and a biological trait as part of its field. Like, again, this is what they teach in 101. As do most other social sciences. Part of the waist-hip thing is that any biological inclination would be very slight, like TFA--so slight as to be, for all intents and purposes, nonexistant. Humans do not have many true instincts, and there are some behaviors that pattern across all cultures. Schizophrenia, for example, manifests the same way in every culture. That's a biological trait.

This study, in my eyes, may well have found a slight indicator of a mild tendency to language. But that's about it. In another culture, it would be unnoticeable, which means there's very little value in the real world in looking at it as an indicator, although certainly it's of value to further research. But at some point, .00000000000000001 is just 0.

my alt's alt's alt:I think it has more to do with personality type. In the eyes of Myers-Briggs, the typical "most womanly" personality type of ESFP is overtly talkative and superfluous in their speech patterns. Whereas myself, the INTJ woman, considers small talk stupid and pointless.

As an experiment in high school, I spent a week not talking unless it was to answer a question or to ask a question about something I really needed to know.

People asked me if I was sick, had I lost my voice, why I had taken a vow of silence, et cetera. I said about five things a day, and three of them were answers to questions a teacher had asked.

I'm perturbed by stories that don't involve last names. I'm not old, but by now I know many "Katies", "Daves", "Jens" and others. When a story starts "I saw Jen today and (wwwwwwwwwoooooordddds) and we're invited over to dinner" I kinda need to know which Jen we're talking about, otherwise I'd just ignore me not fully knowing what is happening. Now when I pause her to ask, it's like I'm the idiot for not knowing who she's talking about. If that's not going on, then it's gratuitous use of pronouns to the point where I can't follow a story.

AncientLurker:Smelly Pirate Hooker: It's amusing that so many of you are married to dipshiats who won't shut up. I'd be sympathetic, but so many of you are also assholes, so I figure you deserve it.

I wont speak for all the assholes (just me), but this is just venting/commiseration. My current gf does yammer occasionally, but I find it amusing, especially since she doesn't do all of the passive/aggressive, underhanded vindictive garbage my X did wife did.

OK. Cool for you.

What I suspect is happening is the same thing parents do with children. It's easier to give in to somebody than correct them. Of course, that means you have to put up with their bullshiat for the rest of their life. Or until you sick enough of it to put a stop to it.

My mother used to tell me fairly long stories about people she works with. I'd asked her how work was going, so fine. But while telling the story, she'd tell me who various people were related to: "I was talking to Becky, she's Mary's daughter" or "And Joan was there, she's John's wife," and I'd wait for this bit of familial info to be come relevant. Then she'd get to the end of the story, and that's it. No clue as to why the fark I had to know who Becky's mother or Joan's husband was. So after awhile, I decided I'd had enough and in the middle of one of these stories, I asked her, "Is there a reason I need to know why so and so is so and so's daughter?" Her: "Well, no, not really." Me: "OK, just checking."

I could tell I hurt her feelings. And knowing her (because my mother almost never forgets an offense) she's still kinda pissed. But she hasn't done it since. Fine by me.

Of course, I don't need to have sex with my mother and I'm happy to go days without talking to her, so I can do this, whereas some of you poor farkers are stuck with the morons you're married to. Have fun.

PsiChick:This study, in my eyes, may well have found a slight indicator of a mild tendency to language. But that's about it. In another culture, it would be unnoticeable, which means there's very little value in the real world in looking at it as an indicator, although certainly it's of value to further research. But at some point, .00000000000000001 is just 0.

So do women in other countries with different cultures not use as many words when talking? Any farker's not from the USA USA USA USA want to answer?

I get that women need you to internalize that which they internalize and ponder vis a vis their own experiences and want to share them with you, in a way that they can understand you actually got, when they internalize THAT, but, and this is important. Ladies? We really can tell when you're just bouncing some crap off of use that one of your BFFs brought up as this week's hoop to hold up for us to jump through so you can go back with your findings. Oh, yes we can. We'll work with you on the former but the latter is sort of insulting. That's what house pets are for.